Policy Lever: Transforming Culture

Financial culture is the body of shared values, norms and biases that guide behaviour and decision-making at individual and organisational levels in financial institutions. Failures of this culture – in terms inappropriate risk-taking, ethical failures, and disregard for client obligations – were central to the global financial crisis. Encouraging a financial culture that supports sustainability is an essential complement to more specific policy, regulatory and fiscal measures.
In the wake of the financial crisis significant changes were made to market, sector,and firm-level systems and controls on behaviour, stemming from macro-level reform packages, actions on markets infrastructure, regulation and supervisory guidance. In general however sustainability has not been a core focus.

Examples

Key steps that could be taken to integrate sustainability into the culture of the financial sector include:

Remuneration regulation: Including sustainability in remuneration regulations – so that individual compensation relates to performance in terms of long-term sustainability.

Codes of conduct: Incorporating environmental and sustainability in policies to promote integrity in financial markets and the upholding of core values.

Non-financial guidance: Encouraging financial institutions to respect global standards of responsible conduct (such as Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises

Impacts

To date most reforms focused on the culture of the financial sector have not explicitly focused on sustainability, but there is potential for wide application. A robust financial culture focused on the needs of the real economy is a criticalprecondition for other efforts to align the financial system with sustainable development.

Inquiry Publications

This paper set out the case for financial institutes and associations in China to establish a green investor network, to monitor investees’ performance of their environmental obligations, foster green investment capabilities, and hold educational programs. Internationally, green investor networks such as the UNEP Finance Initiative and the UN Principles for Responsible Investment have played a

The Green Finance Taskforce was convened in 2014 by the People’s Bank of China and the UNEP Inquiry. The Taskforce brought together leading Chinese experts on financial markets, policy and regulation from government, academia and from the private sector together with international experts and practitioners. One of the inputs to the deliberations of the Taskforce

The paper also shows how the objectives of financial policy-makers—such as investor protection, transparency, maintaining the safety and soundness of financial firms, financial stability, tackling systemic risk, reducing information asymmetries, tacking market failures and developmental objectives— offer multiple avenues to legitimize policy measures that can contribute to the greening of the financial system. In particular,